Tag Archives: rhino

We’re looking forward to putting our new telephoto zoom lens through its paces

Steve’s cleaning our cameras. His next job will be to make up some chilli and curry spice mix packs to add to our spice box (much easier to do now than faff about in the dark at camp).

Me? I’ve cleared the memory cards from earlier in the week, printed off our packing and food shopping lists and have just started gathering together assorted items for the ‘bits n bobs’ bag – a universal sink plug, a sewing kit, some superglue – weird but handy stuff that wouldn’t look out of place in Mary Poppins’ carpet bag.

We’ll be visiting favourite Zululand reserves

We’re about to head off back to the bush on another African photo safari. With just a few days to go before our trip gets underway we’re starting to get excited about the things we might see and, better still, photograph. This time we’ll mainly be photographing in South Africa’s KwaZulu-Natal province, visiting old favourite corners of the Zululand bush and some new ones. We’ll report back on these later – hopefully with some of our results. Trigger fingers crossed we’ll have lots of great photo ops.

We’ll be visiting the newly built hides at Zimanga private reserve, as well as doing some game drives there. It’s on the itinerary of our new photo safaris for 2016 which we’re really chuffed about because this exciting new wildlife reserve is being set up with photographers, as well as wild animals, in mind (at last hides that take our needs into consideration!). We’ve just heard that the alpha female wild dog there is heavily pregnant which is brilliant news. Wild dogs, one of Africa’s rarest apex predators, den in the winter months, now fast approaching in South Africa. Sadly I think we’ll be there a tad too early, on this occasion, to see any playful wild dog pups.

Crossing fingers we’ll run into a wild dog pack in KwaZulu-Natal again

We’ll also be putting our new Canon EF 100-400mm zoom lens through its paces – trying this out in the bush for the first time. We’ve always resisted purchasing big telephoto zooms in the past, opting for the reliability and quality of fixed primes, but…never say never. The thing is there are plenty of times on safari when the ability to zoom out quickly, rather than grab another body or switch lenses would be the ideal. Our 70-200mm lens, for example, is often the perfect fit for ‘shooting’ elephants, and a firm favourite when we’re working in reserves where we can go off road and approach our subjects more closely.

We’re hoping the new zoom will plug a gap in our kit when close stuff suddenly kicks off

But on those lucky occasions when a lion, or lumbering rhino, walks right towards you through the veld – a quality 100-400mm would be just the ticket. We’re hoping we’ve now successfully plugged this gap in our defences. Certainly when we saw the positive reviews about optical quality this particular zoom was getting we felt the time was right to welcome one into our kit bag. We’ll let you know how it performs on our return and whether we’re now big zoom converts…

Steve photographing for Project African Rhino

Finally we’ll be hoping to find out more, too, about what’s happening on the conservation scene, with a particular focus on rhinos, for our Project African Rhino campaign. The project will have been running for three years next month. Where did that time go? When we began we thought after three years we’d probably wind it down, but clearly there’s too much terrible stuff still going on, and so much great work being done that we can’t just abandon the two African rhino species and the conservationists out there fighting for them.

Our focus on the need to save rhinos from the threat of extinction continues

So far we’ve been really encouraged by all the feedback we’ve had while we’ve been raising awareness about the poaching and its fall-out and we’d love it, if you like our work here, for you to check out our companion blog to this one and perhaps give our rhino project Facebook page the thumbs up too…

I can tell from the way we’re needling each other now after long days in the office, processing pictures, polishing pitches and chasing unpaid invoices, that it’s high time we were heading off back to the African bush. Our run-down engines are spluttering, our creative juices have evaporated, the RSI is flaring up and our pasty skins and bleary eyes, after hours in the ‘digital darkroom’ with blinds drawn, are truly zombie-like.

It’s got so bad that yesterday, just to keep going on the projects in hand, we had to down tools for 15 minutes to listen to BBC sound recordist Chris Watson’s wonderful Kalahari soundscape, broadcast earlier this week on Radio Four, on the iPlayer. It’s amazing how much renewed energy you can get just hearing the ping, ping, pinging calls of barking geckoes. A sound we’ll forever associate with evenings in the Kgalagadi Transfrontier Reserve after a busy day ‘connecting’ with Africa’s awesome wildlife.

Fortunately it’s not too long now before we’ll be taking down our special ‘Africa’ crate once again (see our post ‘Six Things to Love About Photography in the Kalahari‘ about this important pre-trip, packing ritual). Re-charging our batteries and nourishing our souls in the wild just can’t come soon enough.

After years of doing this you’d think we’d have this wildlife photography thing nailed by now. But every time we look forward to travelling we resolve to improve our pictures and return home with better shots than before. While we certainly learned early on that there’s no silver bullet or short-cut to getting that great shot we have found a few simple techniques and approaches along the way that help our pictures pack a punch. Here are just a few (and then we must get back to work!):

1. Turn round
Turning your back, quite literally, on the prevailing wisdom that recommends photographing with the sun behind your shoulder immediately presents you with the opportunity to exploit the changing moods and magical effects of back-lighting. Back-lighting is a boon for wildlife subjects because it allows you to focus more attention on them. Distracting detail, and colour even, is held in check, (or is almost non-existent in the shadow areas) so there’s nothing at all to detract the viewer’s eye from the main event. Keep compositions clean and experiment under-exposing shots a bit to further dampen down detail and saturate the golden light. Look out for back-lighting opportunities when photographing animals in water, when it’s cold, or in dry, dusty conditions. A golden spray of water droplets, a veil of condensing breath or a shimmering cloud of dust will really enhance the eye-appeal of your shots.

Shoot into the light to add mood, magic and mystery to wildlife images

2. Go wide
While the foreshortening effect of long lenses can be brilliant for throwing backgrounds out of focus in wildlife shots (and getting close to stuff in the first place!) the downside is your results can sometimes look a bit flat.

That’s why wherever we get the opportunity we like to use wide-angle lenses. Wildlife images made this way always look refreshingly different and have bags of immediacy because subjects appear so ‘in your face’. Unlike long lenses, the broad angle of view when shooting wide gives pictures a dynamic 3-D feel and allows you to include lots of in-focus background detail, too, telling a story about your subject’s habitat and immediately enriching your picture with context. Wide-angle animal close-ups work best at eye level with your subject (or below it) so you not only need to get very close, you need to get down low – often lying prone. The effect is to exaggerate your subjects’ size and characteristics, making them appear to loom out of your picture – straight towards the viewer.

Low and wide is one way to go if you want to make dynamic images of large mammals

3. Think landscape
When we started out and had splashed all our savings on long lenses we photographed everything close-up – all the time. We still do close-up shots, of course, but we temper that desire to fill the frame all the time now because these shots don’t really communicate much about our subject to the viewer – the habitat it prefers or the eco-system it belongs to. They also don’t really capture the sense of scale of a subject or establish any relationship between the subject itself and the world it inhabits. These days we force ourselves to think more like landscape photographers; placing wildlife subjects in the wider scene as thoughtfully as a landscape photographer would frame a scenic shot. As always, photograph when the light is best to make the most of impressive skies and surrounding scenery.

Good landscape techniques with a strong wildlife subject is a winning combo

4. Make eyes
Strong eye contact takes a wildlife image to another level since eyes are the first thing a viewer engages with. We’ve discovered that getting this part of the picture right is vital – putting the ‘life’ into wildlife images. We often pass up on a subject with no catchlight in the eye because we know the resulting image will look lifeless. You can add a catchlight at the post-processing stage, but nothing beats a natural sparkle. Always be ready to press the shutter at the precise moment your subject is wide-eyed and be prepared to shift your position in relation to the sun and your subject. If you can’t get a catchlight immediately, this shuffling of viewpoint often helps. Eyes are such an important feature we often try to make them the ‘essence’ or stars of a picture.

Strong eye contact, an alert stare and pupils clear to see will all help grab and hold the viewer’s attention

5. Break rules
Experiment, be creative, aim to find your own visual style and be prepared to dispense with photographic convention. A lightning bolt won’t strike you if you stray away from the rule of thirds. If you feel it will improve the aesthetics of your image, advance the story you want to tell, or convey the emotion you’re after – go for it. The best images are not the ‘me too’ wildlife clichés, but the ones that dare to be different. A word or two of warning ‘though. Be bold when you veer off the straight and narrow. If you’re too tentative you risk not pulling it off – and always do it for a reason.

Dare to be different – rules work, but can be broken too!

6. Be there
Our best and final advice is quite simple – get out there with your camera as much as you can. Luck is a rare commodity, whatever you’re doing in life, but you can increase your chance of getting better wildlife shots simply by putting more time in. It certainly seems to work for us. That tired old saying ‘F8 and be there’ holds more than a grain of truth. So keep a camera with you at all times when you’re out where the wild things are – that winning shot is out there waiting for you.

Put as much time in as you can to get the most out – patience brings the privilege of seeing and shooting great wildlife behaviour in the field, whether at home or abroad

We’re now just about half way into a three-year photojournalism project we’re doing on African rhinos, aiming to raise awareness of the varied and complex issues involving these amazing animals and their conservation in the wake of the latest poaching onslaught.

Rhinos have been a favourite of ours since we started out in our second career as wildlife photographers, partly because at that time we couldn’t afford long lenses so spent a lot of time photographing bigger game, which we didn’t need a 500mm lens to get decent shots of!

As a result of all the time spent in their company we wrote and photographed a book about them. That was ten years ago, when efforts to protect rhinos were proving extremely successful and their future looked pretty good. But when we saw what was happening as a result of increasing demand for rhino horn in the past few years we couldn’t just stand by. So we started Project African Rhino to get editorial features about the situation into print and raise awareness through our pictures and we began to blog about everything rhino. Next year as part of the project we’ll be producing a new book and hopefully an exhibition too.

Poached white rhino, Lewa, Kenya

To date the project has taken us to East Africa, Namibia and South Africa. The latter has been particularly hard hit. The country is home to the world’s largest population of rhinos and this year has seen a record 919 killed in the poaching crisis.

Sadly the situation is fast reaching a tipping point where the poaching starts outstripping breeding rates, and rhinos will go into decline. The reason? Rhino horn, trade in which is currently illegal, is worth more than gold and cocaine. Demand for it is increasing in places like China, where it’s used for special libation cups and in traditional medicine, and Vietnam, where it’s seen as a status symbol, used as a cool way to detox after a heavy night out, and is incorrectly believed to cure cancer.

Anti-poaching patrol guard, Lewa, Kenya

Highly organised crime syndicates are involved in the poaching and trafficking of rhino horn and their methods are often very sophisticated. The cost of securing wild rhinos in game reserves has soared and conservationists are having to resort to clever tactics, like the use of drones and DNA forensics, over and above standard anti-poaching patrols, simply to stay ahead of the poachers. We hope to keep rhinos in the spotlight for at least the next 18 months or so and you can follow our progress via the project blog.

Avis ATTA Media Awards 2017 shortlist

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